Now that you say this, maybe a shapechange isn't the right tool for this. Maybe I'll change it to just a buff. Make shooting, casting, and devices really bad, but not impossible. I have in mind the humanoid werewolf, not the Tolkien werewolves which appear to be intelligent spirits forced into wolf bodies.

Nick didn't love a half-caster using shapechange anyway. As a BG player I liked the idea of being able to switch back at will, but maybe that's not the right game design choice, either.

What if the shapechange automatically reverted if you did anything except attack?

I like this idea, but it's already being used (more or less) in Bloodlust. At one point I had Werewolf much earlier and didn't have the escalating blows trio that I do now. The thought then was to reward big heavy weapons with the +1 blows, and to be able to chase down fleeing enemies. Now it's already awkwardly close to Bloodlust for a somewhat similar effect, so I'm reluctant to make it even more like Bloodlust unless I move them more apart.

But thanks for the idea. It is worthy of consideration.

It would be easy to prevent shield-bashing while shapechanged.

Yeah, it was definitely risky behaviour to rely on healing from SP use, with the low success rates (9-15% on the half orc and dwarves ive rolled up so far, trading 1 Dex for a few Int has been a lifesaver early on). The escalting reward for being closer to death is pretty cool, made me double check 'r' frequently, which is probably good practice against most Uniques anyway. Things like grim purpose and maim have been much better than chain casting leap, fwiw - is it possible to knock out monsters now with stun? Haven't been able to before they bit the dust yet, but haven't tried too hard.

I keep finding light artifact weapons that give me multiple blows around the same time as I hit lvl 25 or so, which makes me prefer them over a nice maul. Kind of sad about it, but dmg is king.

Werewolf was sweet while it lasted (before I died to greed/laziness), much more reliable than bloodlust, which is a bit terrifying. The 'randomly move toward and attack nearest enemy' effect is very cool - not sure if Conf is still one of the effects but I generally kept Grim Purpose on at the same time when possible. Rampaging through a level trying to keep bloodlust going is pretty fun, but feels very dangerous. Hard to balance with diving when a depth feels 'safe'.

Half orc has a very nice start compared to dwarves imo, and agree with the thematic fit. I tried a hobbit (Shirrif in training before things went wrong) but didn't make it far.

My BG found a lance of extra attacks -- cool, except it has a strong curse that summons demons. Well, maybe that's not so bad! Those demons will help me keep my mana up! hehe! Once my CL is high enough to use Venom reliably, adding venom to this lance will be nice. The extra damage that heavy weapons do from *good* hits, is not (I don't think) accounted for when you "inspect" them. That's a major reason people might ignore the heavy weapons - I had a mace of disruption of extra attacks once, that got a *good* hit about 20% of the time, which was really nice.

I was referring to CL20-24 with a big weapon that normally would only grant 1.0 blows. Doubling your melee damage output for 4 SP is a very good deal!

Yeah one time I had a summon undead curse on a necromancer that was a pretty great mana booster.

This is not a gameplay issue but perhaps a configuration one (or my misunderstanding): the impaired HP regeneration flag for blackguards is set both from class.txt and then as an effect of the COMBAT_REGEN ability in player-calcs.c. Are both necessary? Though, if it is only set as an effect of the COMBAT_REGEN flag, some adjustment will be needed for the display of the second character sheet since that doesn't consider the COMBAT_REGEN flag.